Table 1.
Functional imaging studies showing cerebellar activities associated with negative emotions
| Author and title | Modality | Paradigm | Potential problems/explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lane RD et al. 1997, [16] | PET | Clips showing dynamic facial expressions (happy and sad) vs silent nature clip | Cerebellum activities were found (and only mentioned) in the right lateral cerebellum and in the vermis area with 12 subjects thresholded at p < 0.0005 uncorrected for multiple comparison |
| Neuroanatomical correlates of happiness, sadness, and disgust | |||
| Liotti et al. 2001 [19] | PET | Subjects were asked to generate states of sadness, anxiety, or a neutral, relaxed state comparable to states experienced earlier | Cerebellum activities were found in the right vermis area with 8 subjects with p < 0.001 uncorrected for multiple comparison |
| Differential limbic-cortical correlates of sadness and anxiety in healthy subjects: Implications for affective disorders | |||
| Subjects need to recall memory from its experience, and the paradigm itself also involves cognitive regulation and not perceiving emotion. Therefore the paradigm triggers top-down representations of emotions experienced earlier in life (also involving memory and episodic information), which is different from detecting emotion in a bottom–up fashion by showing emotion-laden dynamic facial expressions | |||
| Garrett et al. 2006 [18] | fMRI (1.5T) | IAPS (international affective picture system, static stimuli depicting negative evoking scenery) | Cerebellum activities were found in the right crus 1 area with nine subjects with p < 0.003 uncorrected for multiple comparison |
| Separating subjective emotion from the perception of emotion-inducing stimuli: an fMRI study | -Pressing button to rate emotion during the experiment. | The paradigm does involve pressing a button; therefore, activations could have been the results of the task, although the contrasts are designed to eliminate activations associated with pressing the button | |
| Van der Gaag et al. 2007 [20] | fMRI (3T) | Dynamic facial expressions vs neutral faces with moving facial muscles but without emotion (e.g. blowing up the cheeks) | Cerebellum activities were found in the right cerebellum area crus 1 when the disgust faces were compared to neutral faces and in the left cerebellum area crus 1 when the fear faces were compared to the neutral faces. Although the cerebellum activities should not be caused by the perception of motion, since the neutral condition also involved motion (though without emotional valence), only one area of cerebellum activation was found in this study with a p value of p < 0.005 uncorrected and using only 10 subjects for this specific analysis. Furthermore, van der Gaag did not really give an explanation why the cerebellum is involved. |
| Facial expressions: What the mirror neuron system can and cannot tell us | |||
| Bastiaanse et al. 2011 [24] | |||
| Age-Related Increase in Inferior Frontal Gyrus Activity and Social Functioning in Autism Spectrum Disorder | |||
| Our stimuli are similar to the studies of van der Gaag and Batiaanse et al. But our study made use of a blocked design with negative and positive emotions, while the van der Gaag study implemented an event-related design. Our design is likely to be more sensitive in isolating activations associated with negative emotions than the van der Gaag study, because we made use of blocked versus event-related design and because we combined disgust and anger together, as we did with happiness and surprise. Our results have multiple cerebellum areas of activation including the cerebellum area crus 1, 2, lobula VI, VIII, and IX and vermis VIII and IX. All areas are thresholded at p < 0.05 with FDR correction for multiple comparisons and with 20 subjects. Our stimuli consist of dynamic facial expressions vs moving geometric shapes; hence, after subtraction, the activity associated with perception of motion should be excluded and what is left should be from the results of the emotional content of the stimuli. |